Arq is super-easy online backup for the Mac. Back up to your own Google Drive storage (15GB free storage), your own Amazon Glacier ($.01/GB per month storage) or S3, or any SFTP server. Arq backs up and faithfully restores all the special metadata of Mac files that other products don't, including resource forks, ACLs, and creator codes.

Arq works like Time Machine, except you don't have to remember to plug in your external hard drive. Following the initial backup, Arq automatically makes incremental backups every hour, every day, uploading just the files that have changed since your last backup. Arq keeps hourly more...

What's New

Version 4.9.1:

New Features

Added "archiving" feature: Select a folder and click "Detach"; Arq will skip that folder during backup, but its backup records will remain at the destination.

Fixed Bugs

Fixed an issue when attempting to read contents of a non-existent Dropbox directory that caused Arq to behave like you were typing in the wrong encryption password more...

Ratings

Details

Arq is super-easy online backup for the Mac. Back up to your own Google Drive storage (15GB free storage), your own Amazon Glacier ($.01/GB per month storage) or S3, or any SFTP server. Arq backs up and faithfully restores all the special metadata of Mac files that other products don't, including resource forks, ACLs, and creator codes.

Arq works like Time Machine, except you don't have to remember to plug in your external hard drive. Following the initial backup, Arq automatically makes incremental backups every hour, every day, uploading just the files that have changed since your last backup. Arq keeps hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for everything older than a month.

Arq lets you set a budget for storage, and it automatically drops the oldest backups to keep within the budget.

Arq backs up everything with no limits. It backs up files of any size, external drives, and network drives.

Arq compresses and "de-duplicates" your backups, never storing the same file twice in the cloud. Arq encrypts all your backups with a password that never leaves your computer, so no one can read your cloud backups.

You can back up to multiple "targets". Back up some files to Glacier, some to S3, some to an SFTP server, etc. You can also back up to Amazon, GreenQloud, DreamObjects, Google Cloud Storage, or any other S3-compatible service.

Take control of your Mac's backups with Arq!

Version 4.9.1:

New Features

Added "archiving" feature: Select a folder and click "Detach"; Arq will skip that folder during backup, but its backup records will remain at the destination.

Fixed Bugs

Fixed an issue when attempting to read contents of a non-existent Dropbox directory that caused Arq to behave like you were typing in the wrong encryption password when restoring.

If Dropbox returns a 429 (rate-limiting) error during backup, sleep and try again. (The main UI will show the error instead of retrying, so that it doesn't seem to hang forever.)

Migrate Arq data in Dropbox from 2-directory structure to single directory structure because if the object-list cache file goes missing, it takes way too long to read the contents of potentially 65,536 directories.

Have used this backup solution off and on over the years. Always come back. Just upgraded to version 4 and it is the best release to date. And the support from Stefan (developer) is nothing short of fantastic. Two words describe Arq . . . THE BEST!

I tried really hard to love Arq.

When it works, it's brilliant. I have it purchased and deployed at 4 different client sites. Three of them work flawlessly, invisibly in the background, providing offsite backup at a very low cost and no user intervention required.

But the other site. It crashes their server within 36 hours of launching every time. I've tried upgrading their server OS (was 10.8.5, now 10.9.4), upgrading the app, quitting every other third-party application (including all drivers and helper apps), rebuilt all the volumes, etc. It keeps killing the server.

It may just be that they have too much data — they're backing up around 8TB at the moment — but there's no published limit. Which brings me to the worst part....

I emailed the support. He wasn't very helpful. At all. I sent him the debug logs. His response was "I can't reproduce the error." Well great, lucky you. I sent him all the requested details on the types of files, configuration, etc etc. And then he just stopped replying to me. It's not like I was abusive or rude in any way, he just hasn't replied to any of my messages in over a week.

So. Great app when it works. When it doesn't.... well, I guess you have to hope the developer can reproduce the issue??